Players can't help but learn from Dungy

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, January 23, 1996

TONY DUNGY'S gifts will be wasted in Tampa Bay. They would be squandered any where in the NFL, because the Buccaneers' new head coach has a higher calling.

The man is a born teacher. He inspires respect without raising his voice, the mark of someone who belongs in a classroom.

This skill has served him well in football, where soft-spoken men are rarely handed mantles of leadership. It helped him over some professional high hurdles - being black, being soft-spoken, being, in all the superficial ways, a contradiction of what an NFL head coach is supposed to be.

BUT ASK his former players, and they will tell you he is everything they want in a coach. According to Vikings linebacker Pete Bersisch, Dungy started every weekly film review with a positive observation, even after the most dreadful games. He didn't berate or humiliate.

"If I reach the point where I have to say, "You SOB, what were you doing there?' we're already in trouble," Dungy told me about a year ago, when he was under consideration for the Philadelphia Eagles' head coaching job.

He recalled the time, in his early teens, when his father took him to a high school basketball game. One of the coaches was a legend, and the young Dungy observed him closely. The coach didn't pace the sideline or jump around. He just sat there, watching and winning.

Puzzled, Dungy told his father: "But he didn't coach."

"You missed the point," his father said. "If you do the job the first five days of the week, Friday night is easy."

The lesson stuck, following Dungy all the way to the NFL.

He has been an assistant for 15 years. Over the last 10, whenever an NFL team needed a head coach, his name usually came up. But he was interviewed only four times, and he was offered nothing.

He accepted the rejections without serious complaint. He saw racism, overt and subconscious, in the NFL, but declined to cite it, unequivocally, as his primary obstacle.

Dungy answered questions on the subject by raising more questions, steering people to their own conclusions. He was diplomatic and discreet in a way that could easily have been interpreted as self-preservation. NFL owners, like all business people, don't appreciate being backed into corners. Dungy wasn't going to win a job by inducing guilt.

BUT WHEN racial bias seemed to be hurting a young player, Dungy made noise. Last winter, he argued that NFL teams probably would have drafted Charlie Ward if he had been white.

The kid was a winner, Dungy said, a quarterback in the Joe Montana mold. Someone in the league should have persuaded Ward to abandon his plans to play basketball. Dungy suspected that NFL executives were less willing to take a risk on a black quarterback, even a Heisman Trophy winner, partly because they had less confidence in his leadership skills and partly because they worried about taking heat if Ward ended up on the bench.

"That probably pained me more than anything I've seen in pro ball," he said. "I just see Charlie Ward as a 21- or 22-year-old looking at it and saying, "What do I have to do?' "

Whether he was right about Ward's potential is open to question. But this is beyond dispute: Dungy showed a lot of spine in making the argument. He was poking consciences pretty hard, risking alienation, and doing it for a newspaper story that would soon appear in Philadelphia, in front of a team owner looking for a head coach.

AT THE time, the rap against Dungy was that he was too soft, too easy on players. John Randle, one of the feistiest men on the Vikings' roster, made a strong case to the contrary.

When a public relations staffer asked Randle to do an interview, he waved off the request, grimacing. "It's about Tony," the public relations man said as Randle retreated to another room. Randle did an immediate about-face, pulled up a stool and said obligingly: "OK, if it's about Tony."

The Bucs, possibly the most woebegone franchise in the league, now have a drawing card for free agents. Dungy will attract players all by himself. USA Today recently polled a small group of NFL stars, who named Dungy the most underrated coach in the league.

DUNGY was fairly lost in Minnesota, as the defensive coordinator of a team that floundered on and off the field. He seemed out of place with the Vikings, whose head coach has been accused of sexual harassment and whose starting quarterback was arrested on charges of assaulting his wife.

"Those are not the kinds of things you want to see. Some of it can't be helped, but some can. Hopefully, we'll be in a little different direction here. I want to talk to our players as we start off on this journey together about what we have to do to represent the city of Tampa in a positive way."

Becoming a head coach might change Dungy. There may not be enough time for him to stick with his piano lessons. His family could lose some privacy. In the past, they surfaced rarely, more in Dungy's conversation than anywhere else.

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He frequently makes references to his wife, Lauren, citing her views on one subject or another. She is a former schoolteacher, he told me.

I asked what his parents had done for a living. Teach, he said, giving exactly the answer I had expected.&lt;

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